There are two reasons for this really:

1. I’m finding it hard to dedicate the amount of time to this project that I used to. And One Panel deserves better I think. It’s a good piece of software and I’m very proud of it.
2. I always dreamed of One Panel returning to its open source roots (as WordPress), and being available as a platform for all theme developers to build upon.

Just a short post for anyone experiencing problems with the contact form on their blog. 2.0.2 now comes with the option to use SMTP to ensure your mail gets through. This tip will assist you if you receive the “Could not instantiate mail function” error when testing your form. It looks like this:

This means that PHP and Sendmail are not working together nicely on your server, but do not despair. If you have an email account with anyone that provides you with SMTP access (Gmail, perhaps your own server, or even your Internet service provider) you may enter those details into your contact form to correct this.

Start by opening up the file contact_form.php in your theme folder (in my case wp-content/themes/OneTheme/contact_form.php), and scroll down until you see this section:

Now we have to uncomment the lines by removing the two forward slashes at the start of each line, and entering our SMTP details in-between the single quotes. As an example I will change the Username to ‘karl@one-theme.com’:

Thats really all there is to it! Save, and upload and as long as you entered working SMTP details your contact form should work like a charm.

Until next time!

Karlo

]]> http://www.one-theme.com/blog/general/adding-smtp-to-your-contact-form-in-202/feed http://www.one-theme.com/blog/general/202-hits-the-shelf http://www.one-theme.com/blog/general/202-hits-the-shelf#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:56:04 +0000 Karl http://www.one-theme.com/blog/?p=35 Hey guys! It’s your friendly neighbourhood Karl here. I wanted to let you all know that 2.0.2 has just been uploaded to the members system. Here’s a run down of the changes:

New Features

1. One Panel now attempts to generate thumbnail images for your posts as you are writing them. Every time you hit ‘Update’ post, the post will be scanned for images to use, and a batch of thumbnails generated accordingly. Thanks to Fahad for suggesting this feature!
2. I have re-written the Contact Form page template. It now uses PHPMailer (already packaged with WP) to send mail. For everyone who has issues with the form I have added some lines to the code that will allow you to enter SMTP details for use with the form. This means if all else fails you can use Gmail or whatever SMTP provider you like to ensure that you are getting your mail from it. I will be doing a tutorial on here and possibly a video explaining how to set this up in the coming week.

Code Refactoring and Bug Fixes

1. Debug console added, and many log entries put in place. OnePanel, and OnePanelConfig objects refactored.
2. The ‘no content on pages’ bug is fixed accross all themes.
3. Switching between themes is no longer a problem.
4. One Panel only runs its license check once.
5. Calls to one-theme.com from inside One Panel changed from post requests to get requests due to issues with servers running mod_security.
6. Fixed two causes of blank modules, although I am not convinced that this is entirely sorted yet.
7. Fixed the issue with utf8 data in the one-panel data causing white screen.
8. Added ‘…’ to the end of the preview content in the featured post.
9. Prevented One Panel code from being fully run whilst browsing normal admin pages.

A full list of fixes can be seen here.

Limited testing has been carried out as of yet, but this version does appear to be fairly stable. As always, please post any bugs on the Bug Tracker so we can get them sorted for the next release in 3-4 weeks.

Enjoy! And thank you for using One Theme.

Karl

Two considerations have to be made here. One is to the end user, the other to the theme developer.

For the end user, the possibility of adding Highlights (or features) to their home page via One Panel would be fantastic. One of the things mentioned in the ‘Change You Want to See‘ post was the ability to specify whether you wanted to feature a post, or page, video, external link, RSS feed, etc. But another cool feature would be the ability to create a ‘Slide Show‘ highlight, allowing you to add whatever you wanted to that highlight and define its position on the page.

I also need to think a little more about Highlight Behavior, as numerous users have presented discomfort about the way certain highlights work. An example would be randomization of the featured post, or displaying certain posts within a featured category. Both would add a new degree of freedom to One Panel that seems to be desirable to you guys right now.

With regards to the theme developers: Currently I am unaware of anyone using the One Panel theme API, and I’m pretty sure no-one is, due to the fact that it is yet to be documented properly. However it is possible by back engineering the onepanel_config.php file in any of our theme folders.  The problem for the theme developer is ensuring that the theme renders correctly, and allowing advanced user control to add and remove highlights as they see fit. Opening up the door for a whole load of CSS issues that I’m sure wouldn’t be appreciated.

There may be some respite here however if we allow the theme developer to force their own Highlight structure using something along the lines of…

OnePanelConfig::ForceHighlightStructure();

Another idea might be to create some kind of rendering policy for each highight, such as Primary (full width), Secondary (two per row), Tertiary, Sidebar. This would allow the theme developer to code containers for whatever the user could throw at One Panel. Or so the hope would be…

Hope everyone is well and thank you to all the subscribers of this blog. Welcome back.

I’ve decided to move One Panel to a faster release cycle (2-3 weeks), implementing less features, more often. The question is ‘what do you need now?’ I have a list as long as my arm of the features I thought about implementing during the 2.0 release, but I’m interested in what you guys feel is missing from One Panel.

If you have an idea then add it to the comments. If you agree with someone else then just type the comment number and say ‘+1′ please (or even ‘++’ if you are a geek like me). The suggestions with the most ‘+1’s will get implemented first.

Here are some of the ideas I had:

Highlights
Allow for featuring of posts, pages, video’s and eternal links.

Thumbnail Generator
Add an interface for the thumbnail generator to the WordPress ‘Edit/Add Post’ page.

Menu Builder
Allow for manual building of menu’s, choosing the posts or pages to add to a specific menu.

Contact Form
Addition of a module that allows manual entry of SMTP server details to ensure emails reach their destination.

I will also be having a look at the suggestion box in the forum long term.

Thanks guys!

As some of you know, our expansion plans fell through. So its back to just Lee, Jay and myself now.

I’ve been churning through the OnePanel code lately looking for bugs and such. But largely just refactoring code.

I’ve also added a massive debug platform, and am now gradually working my way through the code adding log entries to assist me with fixing bugs and anomalies. In future this will run in the background and notify users of any errors or anomalies that may have occured, requesting them to click a button which will send the data to us for analysis. This is a much better way of handling bugs in my opinion. I have already managed to speed up the use of WP admin massively by restricting the OnePanel plugin from running in full force in the admin panel when OnePanel isnt in use.

For anyone that is interested in the improvements and latest development, I have added nightly SVN builds of the OnePanel code to the members area. WARNING though, its not adviseable to ever run these development builds in a production environment. They are not stable and will not be supported as such.

I would also like to add a little note to anyone who reports bugs. First of all thankyou! and Second of all please make your bug report as comprehensive as possible. If we are unable to replicate the problem you are having we have no way of fixing it. So please provide PHP and Wordpress versions. As well as any other plugins you may be running. Also if you could tell us the steps you took to trigger the bug, we will be in a much better position to fix it!

Thank you all, look forward to your comments.

Heres a few things that have changed:

1. We no longer use e-Junkie as our shopping cart, we now have our own shopping cart that works with PayPal. This means no more e-Junkie affiliate links, they will now be dead ends. If you are a One Theme Affiliate please sign up at our iDev site here. iDev is a far superior affiliate system to e-Junkie with masses of features (deep linking anyone?). Anyone who wants to check it out can do so at the iDevAffiliate Website.
2. The member’s system: In the downloads section of the member’s system you will now see an area for each theme you have purchased from our store. Please be aware that each theme is shipped with One Panel, but there is absolutely no need to re-upload it if you already have One Panel installed on your WordPress blog.
3. We now request that people report bugs at our Mantis installation instead of on the forum, this makes them much easier to track and lessens the possibility that they might slip through the net.

In previous versions of One Theme users had to prepare each thumbnail image for use with One Theme on their local machine. Cropping or resizing the image in an image editor such as Photoshop or Gimp to the correct size for each thumbnail type. Once that was done, the image had to be uploaded to a server using an FTP client. The URL of that image then had to be added to the chosen post’s Custom Fields for each thumbnail. This could all be quite a hassle if you had 3000 posts on your site, and the common practice in such cases was to simply de-activate thumbnails, much to the detriment of the aesthetics of your blog.

The Thumbnail generator changes things dramatically. Consider the following:

You have an image on your machine that is bigger than the five different thumbnail types for One Theme.

You open One Panel and load up the Thumbnail Generator. You use the tool to select a post, browse for the file on your machine, and click upload. The Thumbnail Generator then takes your image, resizes and crops it to size for each thumbnail type in the theme. The next thing it does, is automatically add the Custom Field entries to the post you selected. Great right?

If that isn’t enough, you also have the choice of scanning the post for images. Or entering an image URL from the web.

Also in previous versions of One Theme; changing language terms was problematic. It required a php file to be edited by the user and often resulted in errors for our customers. In this version we have added the Localization tool. Now all you have to do is type in the text you are looking for, select it, and edit. Much safer, and no editing of files.

Changelog:
Added: Localization Module
Added: Thumbnail Generator
Added: Ajax Loading Images
Added: Upload OPD File
Added: Search Pagination

Screenshots:

This is hopefully the last BETA, and we expect to release version 2.0 on the 15th of March. Thank you all for your kind comments and encouragement!

We just shipped 1.1.4. Upgrade now!

This is just a little fix, but it makes some very important changes:

1. One Theme Installer - This means no more nasty error messages when installing, we’ve ported the installer over from the 2.0 tree to 1.1.4 for your pleasure.
2. Category Menu in WP2.7.1 - The new version of WordPress broke our category menu. Many, many thanks to Extreme Member for debugging this and sending us the patch!
3. Google Feedburner Accounts - Our FeedBurner subscribe box didn’t work with Google accounts, this is now fixed and compatible with both the old style, and new style FeedBurner accounts.
4. Image Uploads - We’ve made some enhancements to this and finally banished the famous ‘Image Uploads Bug’.
5. Threaded Comments - Now implemented and working with 2.7+!
6. Top Menu Fix - Some much needed fixes to menu rendering in IE and Safari.
7. Styles Update - We ported some of the new styles from the 2.0 beta over for a treat.

This may well be the last of the 1.x series to be released. Depending of course on whether WordPress manage to ship their next release before we ship 2.0 (we sure hope not!).

The first BETA will have little more than the basic One Theme functionality implemented, the new features such as the thumbnail tool will be added over the next week or so. But using the new control panel and messing around with the config files should be enough to keep the testers busy in the mean time.

So now we are tying up some of the code that has thus far escaped us, frantically trying not to stray too far from our deadline. The bug tracker is set and ready for people to join. And I really should be writing code right now!

Catch you later!